We’ve got some incredibly exciting news to announce today – thanks to the amazing support of our existing investors and some new backers, we’ve closed US$20 million (NZ$25 million) in Series B funding! Grab the official press release here.

This latest funding round was co-lead by PayPal co-founder and the first outside investor in Facebook, Peter Thiel of Valar Ventures and Square Peg Capital in Australia. Last year, we raised NZ$8 million in funding, and between 2011 and 2012 we raised NZ$3 million.

So what are we going to do with this money? Grow, grow, grow! We’ll be using this money to expand our presence in North America and Europe, beef up our awesome team so we can continue to delight our retailers with new features they’ll love and amazing customer support (by the way, we’re hiring), and continue to build relationships with resellers and partners from all over the world. Vend is already used by more than 10,000 store owners in over 100 countries, and we’re dedicated to bringing even more retailers on board this rocket ship.

The new funds will also be used to expand Vend’s fast growing channel of reseller partners, as well as build on our list of industry partners, which currently include PayPal (secure in-store payments), Xero (online accounting – also a Valar investment) Stitchlabs (multi-channel inventory management), Swarm (in-store customer analytics) and SelfPay (customer self-checkout).

“The best tech companies are those that enable you to do more with less,” says Peter Thiel, co-founder of Valar Ventures. “Vend’s powerful software is poised to enable millions of small- and medium-sized businesses to focus less on paperwork and more on bringing better products and services to their customers.”

“We’re proud to continue supporting the team at Vend. Vend is adding value for retailers around the world by providing an outstanding product at an attractive price, combined with world class support,” adds Barry Brott of Square Peg Capital.

The past few years have seen a resurgence in independent retailers who have become more competitive against big chain stores by adopting cloud-based software. Vend is proud to be helping drive that movement, by offering brick-and-mortar stores the kind of tools and business intelligence previously only available to the big guys. This is going to be a huge year for us, so stay tuned for more exciting news in the coming weeks and months.

If you have any media enquiries, feel free to get in touch with Simon Pound (simon@vendhq.com).

Vaughan is the Founder of Vend. A moustachioed entrepreneur and technologist, Vaughan's goal is to make retailers' lives easier. When he's not leading the team, Vaughan is running marathons and raising his kids. Connect with Vaughan on Google+.